One early October evening, Ousmane Touré takes his accustomed seat in front of the microphone in the studio of Radio Naata in the northern Malian city of Gao. He focuses tonight’s show on the start of the new school year. The broadcast begins with interview clips, in which children and parents share their hopes for the months ahead.
Mr. Touré’s microphone is a lifeline to his community, but this seemingly innocuous reporting puts a target on his back. In northern Mali, journalists work under constant threat from jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, some of whom are currently threatening the capital, Bamako. Reporters have been threatened, abducted, and forced to flee their homes.
At the same time, Mali’s military government has tightened its grip on the media in recent years, banning international outlets, expelling foreign correspondents, and shutting down local stations that refuse to follow the official line.
Why We Wrote This
Independent journalism is under grave threat in the Sahel region of Africa. In Mali, one community radio station shows the lengths to which local reporters go in order to keep their communities informed.
Squeezed from both sides, independent journalism is being pushed to the edge of extinction. Community stations such as Radio Naata are now one of the few remaining links between towns and villages across northern Mali, a fragile but vital lifeline for people otherwise largely cut off from the outside world.
“People tell us, ‘we don’t want the radio to stop,’” says Mr. Touré, Radio Naata’s director.
A word for hope
For a generation, Radio Naata has been a fixture in Gao, a desert city more than a millennium old on the banks of the Niger River. Once the capital of the mighty Songhai Empire, the metropolis still shows glimpses of its ancient glory. The city’s Sahelian-style mosques, with their rounded minarets and walls of ocher clay, seem to rise and melt back into the desert as the sunlight plays on them.
Radio Naata began broadcasting here in 1993, at a moment of fragile hope. Mali had just held its first multiparty presidential election, and the government signed a ceasefire with Tuareg rebels fighting for regional autonomy in the north.
To mark the new era, a small group of teachers, journalists, and local leaders in Gao decided to start a local radio station focusing on peacebuilding, health, and daily life. “At that time, there was an urgent need for a medium to carry the message of peace,” recalls Mr. Touré – who got his start as a journalist at the new station – in an interview in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
The station received initial support from the government and from development organizations. But the most important buy-in came from Gao’s residents.
When the station was founded, representatives of each ethnic group in the city brought what they could – chickens, cattle, or cash – to help fund it. The name was also a nod to the optimism of the time. Communities across Gao proposed words in their own languages. The final choice, naata, means “hope” in Songhai.
Unity on the airwaves
From the beginning, Naata played a crucial role in fostering social unity across Gao’s diverse communities, mediating disputes between farmers and herders, covering educational issues, and amplifying nongovernmental organizations’ health initiatives.
Other community radio stations play a similar role throughout Sahel, a sparsely populated region just south of the Sahara desert that stretches from Senegal to Sudan. Typically founded by local teachers, journalists, and community associations, these stations often run on a shoestring budget, patching together support from local communities and development agencies. There are several hundred in the region, according to the media advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders.
Like Radio Naata, their mandates are broad, from issuing warnings about land mines, to sharing health advice and helping settle community disputes. Unlike international outlets, which typically broadcast in French, community stations use local languages such as Songhai, Fulfulde, Hausa, and Bambara.
These stations also generally do not discuss politics, which makes them “vital instruments of social cohesion,” explains Sadibou Marong, sub-Saharan Africa director for Reporters Without Borders.
Journalism under threat
But in recent years, community radio stations have also found themselves at the epicenter of a widening regional conflict. Following years of rebellion and state collapse, vast areas of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have fallen under the sway of jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Now, jihadis linked to Al Qaeda are advancing on the capital, Bamako, threatening to besiege the city.
Gao has known its own share of violence. In 2012, the town fell first to Tuareg separatists and then to jihadist groups, all of them exploiting the vacuum left by a weakened state.
The jihadis brought new rules for Radio Naata: No women allowed on the air and no music – only religious chants and Quranic recitations. Locals euphemistically called their new rulers “the bearded men” – a nickname Mr. Touré and his staff adopted as well to avoid offending them on air.
“At first, I refused to broadcast out of fear,” Mr. Touré recalls, referring to the initial days of the jihadist occupation in 2012. But the new authorities soon came to find him, insisting that he return to the airwaves under their strict rules. “We had no choice but to adapt,” he explains.
Even after French and Malian troops retook Gao in 2013, peace never truly returned in the region. Since then, the city and its surroundings have remained caught between armed groups, criminal networks, and a weakening state.
Journalists, however, continued to work under constant threat from insurgents.
In November 2023, the danger struck too close to home for Radio Naata. A young news presenter for the station, Abdoul Aziz Djibrilla, was traveling to Gao for a media workshop when his vehicle was ambushed by a armed men. He was killed instantly. Two fellow journalists from Radio Coton Ansongo, another community station, were abducted and remain missing.
Mr. Touré received the news that morning as he awaited the journalists’ arrival for the workshop. “These are very painful memories,” he says simply.
In other ways, too, keeping Radio Naata alive is a constant battle. While government censorship is less intense for community radios than for commercial stations, journalists still often self-censor on security-related issues. Meanwhile, funding – which comes mostly from NGOs – is sporadic. Salaries are a rare luxury. But the station carries on.
Back in the studio on a recent evening, Mr. Touré adjusted his white turban, leaned into the microphone, and pressed the button that sent his voice live across the city. His voice flowed out over the airwaves, stretching across Gao, out along the Niger River, and then into the desert, where all around, villagers listened in the dark.
